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Every Business Is a Tech Business

NEW YORK (
TheStreet) -- The coming death of the printed
Newsweek,
reported by
CNN (it was long ago supplanted by
The Daily Beast,
CNN noted
) is a great reason to repeat the key business truth of our time.

Every business today is a technology business.

The doughnut shop
around the corner from me
benefitted from Kickstarter,
Yelp(YELP - Get Report) and
Facebook(FB - Get Report). The restaurant
down the block
credits Living Social and Foursquare with its success.

Every kind of business is an information business, subject to being transformed without notice. This is why your local newspaper is in such trouble, with
BIA Kelsey
seeing continued revenue declines through 2016. Online efforts can't make up for print advertising losses, if you don't understand that technology evolution is continuous.

To see how fast things change, consider politics.

In 1996, we had the first political Web sites, and in 2000, I wrote about how Bush lawyer Ben Ginsburg stopped Sen. Bill Bradley's (D-NJ) momentum by claiming that "webrings" were campaign contributions. (Remember webrings? Exactly.)

The year 2004 was the year of the blog, making Howard Dean (briefly) a household name. In 2008, the Obama campaign scaled that intimacy with an online platform that mimicked the cloud before the buzzword even existed. And 2012 is the "social media campaign," with Twitter putting everyone in the spin room.

How fast do things move? After the health care decision by the Supreme Court, someone photoshopped Obama's head on a picture of Harry Truman, changing the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline in the
Chicago Tribune into
CNN's wrong headline, "Mandate Struck Down," on an iPad. (
Here it is at imgur.com
.)

The iPad was introduced in 2009.

What have newspapers given us in all that time? Mostly paywalls. Some even allow comments, on a few stories, to registered users. (Plus they're still writing stories. Most have yet to figure out that stories evolve in real-time, and that what people read has to evolve in real-time as well.)

The point is that you have to keep up with technology, in everything you do, in every area of business, because your competitors will. I now get my neighborhood news from a blog called
DecaturMetro, and for local retailing I depend on one called
Tomorrow's News Today
. Will either be around four years from now? Only if they evolve.